


crossroads

by thescrewtapedemos



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: .....kind of, Horror, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Supernatural Elements, minimal research maximal bullshit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-29 17:13:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12635490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescrewtapedemos/pseuds/thescrewtapedemos
Summary: It's not a good idea to try rituals you find on the internet.





	crossroads

**Author's Note:**

> first of all demons are hot so jot that the fuck down. secondly, i'm sorry, i did my best
> 
> enjoy!! xoxo

He digs the hole in the closest he can approximate to the dead center of the crossroads. Nestles the little box inside and pushes the dirt back into the hole. 

His hands sting a little bit, with the cold and the sharp stones. It's enough to make him uneasy. Everything about this is making him uneasy. Even with the dramatic lights, the camera humming behind him, suddenly there's something eating its way up his throat. Something sitting on his chest and making every breath he pulls desperate. 

He turns to the camera. 

“So I just finished my part of the crossroads demon summoning,” he announces. He pitches his voice for the camera even though his tongue feels clumsy with the cold and the unease, the wind in the grass like a knife on his piano wire nerves. He can't stop his eyes wandering to the darkness beyond the cameras, beyond the lights. 

Somehow the lights make it worse. The fog circling and circling in until it laps at the circle of the camera equipment, the skeleton shadows of dead trees tossing fitfully in the wind, the world cut down to the claustrophobic little circle of their lights. Brent, their camera tech, and Ryan. 

He hauls in a breath that doesn't sit in his lungs right. 

“If we've done the ritual right a demon should show up any second now to make a deal.” 

They wait. A long moment of the wind in the grass and the dirt scratching under Ryan's shoes as he shifts. 

There's something there, he thinks. Something, something that has to be there because his chest is tightening, his skin is pricking in rushing waves. Something gathering in the air, pressure like his skin is too tight. 

It feels like he's being watched, he thinks dimly. The prickle of eyes on him, the heavy weight of it. Just to his side, maybe, just a little behind his field of vision. Like if he turned maybe he could see it, like if he just looked he could make out what’s watching-

“I don’t think this is good footage,” Brent says, and Ryan turns to glare. 

“It isn’t _anymore_ ,” he snaps back. Brent shrugs, digs his phone out of his pocket. 

The wind has died down and the only noise is the dirt crumbling under their shoes, the camera tech’s quiet hum as she adjusts the equipment for a wide angle shot. Ryan tries not to look beyond her, beyond Brent into the dim fog. He knows he sees things. He knows sometimes they’re not real. 

The weight is between his shoulderblades now. He doesn’t want that to be real. 

“Let’s pack up,” he says after a moment. “No demon’s gonna show up.”

* * *

He doesn’t sleep well that night. 

The curtains are pulled but he’s still so aware of the darkness beyond them, the gaps in the curtain it peeks through. The darkness of the motel bathroom through the gape of the open door, the wavery reflection in the cheap mirror hung over the television. 

Brent breathing quietly in the other bed doesn’t help as much as Ryan wishes it did. He wants to wake him up but doesn’t know what he’d say, doesn’t know how to explain the feeling in the air and the way the paranoia is digging into him. 

The weight of eyes on him has turned into tightness around his chest. Something, he’s waiting for something. Something to happen, or something to give so that he can let go of the breath it feels like he’s been holding for all the hours it took to pack their equipment into their van and drive back to this bleak little town. 

He’d tried not to let his back be to the crossroads. He’d tried not to look back at it too but he hadn’t been able to stop himself, somehow. Watching the dim little crossroads fade back into the fog of the road until he was making up shapes. Until he’d needed to look down at his hands, clenched together in his lap until they ached and he knew that was real.

* * *

He tries to sleep a little better when he gets home. Buys a white noise machine. Tries to cut back on the coffee after noon. 

It’s the project unsettling him for the most part, the isolation and the long hours and having to advocate for what’s scaring him so much. He drinks a lot of coffee and tries to focus on the details of each unsolved case, the research of history. 

History doesn’t scare him, not really. Nothing will crawl out of a history book and possess him, none of the long-dead victims haunt him. 

He doesn’t dream that much, despite everything. Nothing he remembers, anyway. It’s only lying awake, trying to ignore the windows, the hollow of the closet, the dark corners of the room.

* * *

His supervisor listens when he complains about Brent dragging down the energy of the show. 

Somehow he can barely find it in himself to feel guilty when he finds out that Brent’s been assigned to a different project, one Ryan probably won’t have to be involved in for a long time. He’s been assigned a new partner, and he grins up at the man they usher in with something equal parts falsity and relief. 

Shane smiles down at him. 

“I don't believe,” he says easily, skipping his introductions entirely, and Ryan feels something in him loosen, something taking a breath for the first time. 

“I’ll make a believer out of you,” he promises, cocky like he doesn’t really feel, and Shane’s grin widens into something that crinkles his eyes, makes his face something friendly. 

“I wish you luck, sir,” he says.

* * *

He dreams he’s standing in the hallway of something- a hotel maybe. 

Industrial carpet under his feet, maroon and beige. Dull wallpaper. Doors at regular intervals off into the dreamy distance, shut tight. 

There’s another corridor when he turns, intersecting the one he’s standing in at perfect institutional angles. 

Behind him a door opens.

* * *

The doll island isn’t terrible. 

He hates it, and the spiders are terrible, and he swears the smell of old plastic will cling to the jacket forever, but the island isn’t terrible. They get good footage. Ryan doesn’t step in any of the old water. 

Shane’s hand finds his, broad and warm and dry, hauling him from the boat to land, and doesn’t let go until he’s pointing out the dolls. Ryan doesn’t let himself focus on that, just points the camera where it needs to go.

* * *

His supervisor sends him an email about their numbers and tells him in a way that’s supposed to seem gentle that their site-visit video is doing the best. Shane grins when Ryan tells him so, shrugs and stretches happily. 

“I guess we’re visiting more demons,” he says thinly. 

“As long as they keep paying me,” Shane replies. He’s watching Ryan through the squint of his smile. 

Ryan looks down at his hands.

* * *

He's on his knees in the halls of somewhere he recognizes- dim recognition, a hollow echo of memory in the broad blocks of masonry, the vaulting of the ceiling. Absent grandeur, the bones of something that had been meant to be great and still, empty and ruined, grand. 

It’s a dream

Two intersecting corridors almost too big to be called corridors that lead away from him in every direction, honeycombed with arches, lit cold and diffuse and shadowy from somewhere he can’t quite make out. Cement and stone. He’s cold. His hands hurt. 

With dreamlike disinterest he notes that he’s brushing the floor clear, sweeping arcs of the dirt and dust and pebbles. He's looking for something, something in the rock and earth. His palms are raw. 

He realizes there are footsteps in the moment they stop. Someone standing at his shoulder. For a long time they say nothing and Ryan keeps searching, brushes aside sharp stones with hands that feel a moment away from cracking and bleeding. 

He shuffles forward a few inches. The person moves with him. A single footsteps crunching in the dirt. 

“It's not here,” Shane says, and Ryan looks up and there's no one there.

* * *

They’re looking into a new demon house, maybe something for a season finale, but the owner is taking longer to bring the key than they expected. It leaves them on a cold sidewalk in the night air, just them and their cameras and the breath clouding around them. 

He’d forgotten his gloves and the cold is setting into the bones of his hands, aching, stinging when he breathes onto them and rubs them together to preserve the heat. 

Shane’s quiet, quieter than usual. He keeps looking back at the house and shifting his feet, over and over like a nervous tic. Ryan watches him, watches him shuffle in place and then glance back again. 

“Scared?” he asks, and Shane turns to look at him. Almost cartoonishly confused, eyebrows up and mouth a perfect O. It doesn’t look real. 

“Scared?” he echoes. Ryan glances back where Shane had been looking. Looks at the dark windows, the peeling paint. The porch steps bowing under their own weight. 

“Of demons,” he offers, tries to sound teasing. He mostly manages, he thinks. 

Shane’s watching him, still all arched eyebrows, amused now. 

“No, I’m not scared of _demons_.” 

Ryan lets it lapse. Doesn’t push, because he doesn’t have his camera running and there’s no point in fighting if it’s not going to make for good footage. His feet are going kind of numb and he shuffles them to reinvigorate the circulation a little. He wonders where the owner is. It’s not like there’s traffic, so late at night. 

An ambulance whines past, tires quiet on the dark pavement. Slow, sirens quiet and lights off. Ryan watches it stop at the corner, wait for the light to change before turning left and continuing where he can’t follow it. 

“You know what they say, right?” Shane murmurs and Ryan looks at him. He’s looking the way the ambulance went but he glances back. He’s smiling, just a little bit, just a little curl to the corner of his mouth all tucked up and secret. 

“When an ambulance goes by like that, mean’s it’s got someone dead inside.”

* * *

He opens his eyes. 

He's back at the crossroads and he's thought about it a lot, remembered it so often the memory is worn like a photograph. The fog pressing in like a living thing, the wet shine of their camera equipment. The trees around them, skeletal and unnatural in their humps of dead leaves. It’s never like this, like it’s real, like he can taste the cold wetness of leaves rotting on his tongue, like he could reach out and touch the cold metal of the camera tripod. 

He’s alone. He’s alone, and he turns in a slow circle. 

“He-,” he gets out, half of a shouted greeting, but his foot catches in something and he goes down so abruptly he doesn’t know what’s happening-

* * *

He jerks awake and he’s alone, alone in his room and not in the circle of the crossroads, there are blankets tangled around him and he can’t catch his breath. 

He curls in on himself instead of screaming the way he wants to. Pants and chokes and struggles to pull in enough air. He doesn’t cry but his cheeks are wet and the cold air of his bedroom stings.

* * *

“You okay, man?” Shane asks kindly. Ryan looks down at the coffee in his mug. He’s shaking and it’s sloshing the coffee quietly around. Just a fine tremble. He doesn’t know if that’s what Shane’s asking about. 

“Bad dreams,” Ryan mumbles. He’s almost telling the truth. He doesn’t want to talk about it. 

He glances up when Shane puts a hand on his arm but Shane doesn’t say anything. He’s just looking, and his eyes are dark and kind and Ryan can’t meet them for long. 

He lets Shane pull him into his side. Lets himself settle into the warmth of it because he’s so tired, and it feels nice. He closes his eyes and clings to his coffee mug and wishes the fear bound into his ribcage would relent. Just for a moment. Just for a breath.

* * *

-he’s falling and as he becomes aware there’s a burst of pain in his arms and hands and face and chest and-

He’s already sprawled across the dirt. 

His hands hurt, stinging where they’d tried to break his fall against the sharp gravel of the road. He can smell it in the air, the cold rot, the choking fog. The crossroads, and he turns over to see what he’d tripped over. 

There’s a little hole in the dead center of the crossroad haloed in tiny mounds of freshly turned earth. 

Footsteps, crunching in gravel, and Ryan looks up with an inevitability that hurts in his bones. 

“You shouldn't have left that box at the crossroads,” Shane says.


End file.
